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Gjergji Dushniku

International School of Architecture and Urban Development Policies

P02 | GOOGLE OFFICES: Interactive Architecture

by Gjergji Dushniku

For hundreds of years ago and still nowadays, architecture is a direct response to the development of society at a certain time. The matter of space and time that is relevant to a building, though, is different from the matter of space and time that society perceives. Society has specific needs during a certain period of time, and while those needs are changing very fast, architecture is not. In 1960, Cedric Price was thinking about that and he asked "What if a building or a space can be generated and regenerate constantly?" The answer today is offered through the field of Interactive Architecture. While Google offices are spread all over the world, they do not have a big presence in the Balkans region. This thesis project proposes the creation of a new space for Google offices in Tirana as a regional meeting point and furthermore for the development of Information Technology projects. From the perspective of the urban scale, the idea behind the proposal is to reactivate the former industrial areas and to serve as an urban catalyst in the area. The main point of this project was to find ways and to experiment with the creation of an interactive building on many levels. The most important one was the interaction between the people and the building, which takes place in an indirect way through "The Maintainer," which is actually a robot. This artificial entity is implemented from the work of R&SIe(n) and is one of the best examples of a robot collaborating with architecture in order to achieve a possible interactive space. In my thesis, the robot is intended as a extruder-intruder element of some parts of the building. The building itself has some static and some interactive parts. Porosity serves as the border between the interior and the exterior environment, blurring the limits between the public and the private. There are many layers. Starting from the interior one, there are the modules that serve as different kinds of offices and they connect with each-other with bridges in space. These are free spaces, which the workers can define through their activities. Those modules can be transformed into platforms or they can expand with more spaces as needed, either manually by the people or through the robot. The skin of the building has integrated the structure, the panels of perforated corten and the green module that collects water to grow plants. The robot directs the green module to change position and size by the season, sun and temperature, in order to develop and adapt in deferent climate conditions.

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Gjergji Dushniku is an architect and an urban designer. In 2012, he graduated from Polis University in Tirana, Albania, with a second Master in Applied Design in the field of parametric design. He is a member of the Albanian Union of Architects (AUA) and the chairman of the Polis Alumni Association. He has participated in many international conferences and workshops like the Tirana Architecture Week in Tirana, the Polis University - Projecting through participating in Balkan Cities , in Bauhaus, Dessau, the Mikser Festival, in Belgrade, Serbia, the Keisserschnitte at the TU Wien in Austria, the Tirana River at the TU Karlsruhe in Germany, the Sicily Lab in Sicili, Itali and so on. He was also nominated for the Archiprix 2013 in Moscow. Currently he works at the Polis University as an Assistant Professor at the Sustainability Laboratory and Innovation Department. He is also involved at the Metropolis Studio of Architecture based in Tirana. He is interested in interactive architecture, paramentric design and flexible context.